The local electrical grid (micro-grid) of a modern residence, a commercial location or other premises hosts a variety of electrical appliances representing diverse electrical loads. The individual load devices represented by these electrical loads are transparent—not individually identifiable—to the electrical power provider, or to any party/system that could otherwise benefit from knowledge of the identity, state and condition of the individual appliance drawing from the electrical power source. It should be noted that an individual load device can be any type of appliance on the local micro-grid, including: typical household appliances (e.g., refrigerators, washers, televisions, etc.), heating/air-conditioning units, air-handling equipment, power benches, machine tools, lighting appliances, electronics, industrial equipment, turbines, generators, etc.
If the identification of such appliance loads on the micro-grid can be made with confidence, a new level of control, management and maintenance can be made available to a broad range of beneficiaries: e.g., utility providers seeking to identify loads for remote load analysis & control; marketing organizations in need of highly reliable power usage data, OEM's looking to identify customer bases, or residential and commercial premises power consumers looking to manage their electrical energy usage.
The field has been motivated to move at least somewhat in this direction, in that means for monitoring the overall power consumption of a premises are known in the art. For example, Hart. et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 4,858,141) describe an apparatus that is attached to the power line outside a residence, and monitors the overall power consumption of the loads in the residence. Further, Hart reports the ability detect the time specific contribution of individual, unidentified appliance loads to the overall power consumption of the residence. However, the Hart apparatus only monitors the power supply line into the residence, does not and cannot receive or process an input from or identify an individual appliance load as a specific appliance (i.e., refrigerator #1 from refrigerator #2). Also, if the duty cycle of refrigerators #1 & #2 overlap, the Hart apparatus cannot precisely distinguish which of the two came on first or went off last. Although, such apparatuses or systems may be useful for their intended purpose, if they only monitor the overall power consumption of a micro-grid (or a branch of the grid) the identification and characterization of the specific, individual appliance associated with a detected load cannot be made with confidence.
Further, it would be extremely beneficial to be able to use the identity of individual appliances to access a specific appliance to monitor and control its power consumption. The ability to identify an individual appliance, to characterize it power usage profile, even without the ability to control its operation, allows resource planning and budgeting, maintenance scheduling, determination of the operational condition of such loads, and optimizing their draw of power the electrical source/provider.